The present invention relates generally to interactive television. More particularly, the invention relates to a speech-enabled system for navigating through the complex menu structure of an electronic program guide so that an optimal amount of information may be displayed to the user for subsequent program selection.
One of the problems inherent to accessing television contents using an electronic program guide and conventional remote control is that a complex number of displays or hierarchical menus need to be looked at before the wanted information can be accessed. Using current technology, it can sometimes take several minutes for information on a rotating electronic program guide to be displayed to the user. Moreover, interacting with such on-screen program guide displays is cumbersome, because conventional pushbutton remote controls are clumsy and difficult to operate in darkened rooms.
The present invention addresses this problem by using speech recognition and natural language parsing to automatically filter the contents of the electronic program guide so that an optimal number of fine-tuned selection can be displayed to the user for subsequent selection by voice or through conventional pushbutton control or other means. The invention is thus fast and less intrusive to the user watching a television program, because only a part of the screen needs to be used to display the requested information. Often, it is possible to complete a request in a single sentence. In this case, there is no need to display any information on the TV screen. The system can filter information on a variety of different bases including filtering by time, channel, type of program or movie, actor, director, and so forth. More generally, the filtering may be performed upon any item included in the slots of the frame semantics used by the system to represent meaning.
For a more complete understanding of the invention, its objects and advantages, refer to the following specification and to the accompanying drawings.